Back to School Shots: How Your Child is Being Programmed

Many parents already know that it is common practice for health departments, schools, and insurance companies to offer prizes to children and their families for being vaccinated. These programs have been implemented across the country and are designed to boost vaccination rates, rather than protect children’s health.

Prizes are also offered to health care providers who increase their immunization rates and fully immunize babies and toddlers within their practices.

However, parents may be surprised to learn about, later in this article, the massive amounts of money some doctors receive as bonus payments for vaccinating young patients. This article is a must-read for all parents, whether or not you have a child who will be resuming traditional school in the fall.

These Incentive Programs are Nothing New

Sadly, the idea to offer prizes in exchange for vaccinations has been around for decades or longer. A New York Times article from 1988 outlined the many ways our own city and state governments had already misguidedly encouraged parents to vaccinate their children, including offering prize drawings for a new car, bicycles, and coupons for discounted meals at fast food restaurants. [1]

Children were encouraged to create designs for billboards to promote vaccination, at a time when health departments were facing declining vaccination rates, increasing costs, and growing vaccine schedules. Despite these concerns confronting public health departments, in 1988, children only needed 13 doses of ten vaccines by age 12, compared with 69 doses of 16 vaccines by age 18 today. [2, 3]

On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) own website, the organization admitted that “since 1988, the U.S. childhood immunization schedule has rapidly expanded.” The number of recommended vaccinations has increased over 414 percent since 1950, when children were vaccinated with only seven vaccines by age six. [4, 5]

As the number of recommended vaccines has increased, the incentive programs have become more numerous, too.

Immunize to Win a Prize, Thanks to the Government

The Community Guide, a website with ties to the CDC and Healthy People 2020, has a task force which “recommends client or family incentive rewards, used alone or in combination with additional interventions, based on sufficient evidence of effectiveness in increasing vaccination rates in children and adults.” [6]